Modern Library Revue: #28 Tender is the Night

Related Books:

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This week marks four years since I began the Modern Library Revue, and herewith its 32nd official installment. I began the project the way I think people must begin training for a marathon, or eating like a caveman, or going to church: I felt some inner restlessness, some fullness, that needed exercising and exorcising. I chose the Modern Library list for my spiritual Nordic Trac because I had read one or two novels less than half the novels on it, and thought quite sensibly that this would give me a good head start. At first, the entries tumbled out of me as fast I could write them. And in these four years, I’ve managed to read another 30 titles from the list. But somehow, here we are at a mere 32 Revues. At this pace, it will be another eight years, God willing, before I finish the enterprise. (And oh, the party I’ll have.)

Despite my initial aspirations and productivity, I have found that the familiar books have been the hardest to interpret, the most likely to hamstring me over a period of weeks or months. Always they require rereading, and sometimes something more drastic. I’ve been stalled on Tender is the Night since October, which befuddled me to the extent that, not only did I have to reread it a third time, I had to reread all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and meditate on them before deciding that I know less, possibly, than I did before.

I used to feel that the novel output of Fitzgerald was like the literary version of the Myers Briggs test: whichever one a person favored was some fundamental indicator of his or her personality. Roughly it followed that ordinary and banal people liked The Great Gatsby, snotty, effete types liked This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned was for the discerning and unconventional (I’ll let you guess in which camp I numbered myself). Tender is the Night was sort of an unknown quantity, preferred by dramatic people, maybe, or people who take pills. This fall, in a classic Modern Library Revue time-suck, I revisited my youthful prejudices, all in service of understanding Fitzgerald’s last, strangest novel.

I can’t say that revisiting my youthful prejudices has confirmed them — This Side of Paradise crept up in my estimation, while The Beautiful and Damned moved slightly down, even while retaining the coveted corner office of my heart. However, to venture onto a tangent, I can say that The Great Gatsby still remains for me the least stirring of Fitzgerald’s novels. Perhaps it’s due to some wellspring of hipster haterade that must deem things played out, or perhaps The Great Gatsby is so great that it has actually managed to play itself out. After all, it’s as familiar now as the noble bombast penned by Fitzgerald’s own relative, the green light like the rocket’s red flare, the pier at East Egg like the ever-stalwart rampart, the boats beating on like liberty itself.

I feel that The Great Gatsby is the most together, the most surgically artistic effort of a novelist who was more exciting when he was not trying to contain the hot, maudlin, meandering mess of his own talent. (For the record, I also sense something phony about Gatsby’s very phoniness — for me the only convincing poor person Fitzgerald wrote was one who lost his fortune, not one who made it. Fitzgerald’s poor people were like his black people or his Jews–all characteristics, no character.)

2.
If The Great Gatsby represents the nadir of said hot mess, Tender is the Night is its sprawling apotheosis. It’s hard to know what to say about this sultry dream of a book. Aesthetically it is very beautiful, the most impressionistic of Fitzgerald’s novels. A paragraph about Gausse’s Riviera beach makes me want to disport myself in the wine-dark sea, and ruin my skin in the sun wearing pearls and a marcel wave. There is a striking amount of color: the first two pages features a “tan prayer rug of a beach,” the “pink and cream of old fortifications,” a “purple Alp,” a man in a blue bathrobe, a girl with pink palms. The first half of the novel is all a bright haze of color, sensation, perception, personality. The revelation that the life events of the novel’s motley crew of upper-crusters might have anything to do with something like a plot is a surprise when it comes, about a third of the way through the novel.

As a plot, it’s an odd one, full of a kind of fruitless drama and portents that somehow portend both nothing and everything. Only the flimsiest motives are provided to explain why a man like the superhero Dick Diver, with his jaunty striped shorts and bathing cap, should piss away his life, trade in his professional credibility and crazed beautiful wife and Riviera idylls for a ruined liver and thwarted attempts at grab-ass in sleepy villages along the Hudson. Even fewer reasons are provided for why we should care. The demise part is okay — that’s a theme in all the novels past This Side of Paradise. But Dick and Nicole Diver are the sort of unlikable corollaries of Anthony and Gloria Patch of The Beautiful and Damned, which is a great, old-fashioned morality tale with implacable logic. I think it’s a shame, how it works out for the Divers, but they never seemed like very fine people to me.

I found an explanation for the novel’s strangeness partly in a 1962 New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins about Sara and Gerald Murphy, the original inspiration for Dick and Nicole Diver. The novel started out to be about the Murphys, and turned, says Tomkins, into a book about the Fitzgeralds (who were also the models for Anthony and Gloria Patch). These Murphys were real Somebodys, who knew everybody and lived artfully in Paris and on the Riviera, which they actually discovered as a summer destination.

Tomkins’s profile, which is well worth reading, has its own, dare I say, novelistic logic. I spent the first half of the piece feeling a certain savagery toward the Murphys. Page one (of thirteen) makes Tender is the Night out to be a turd on the porcelain of the Murphys’ impeccable lives:

“I didn’t like the book when I read it, and I liked it even less on rereading,” Sara said. “I reject categorically any resemblance to us or to anyone we knew at any time.” Gerald, on the other hand, was fascinated to discover…how Fitzgerald had used “everything he noted or was told about by me” during the years that the two couples spent together…Almost every incident, he became aware, almost every conversation in the opening section of the book had some basis in an actual event or conversation involving the Murphys, although it was often altered or distorted in detail.

I found both positions deeply suspect — the vehement denials and the faux naivete about artists, from people who surrounded themselves with artists (Hemingway, Stravinsky, MacLeish, Dos Passos, etc.). This strain of philistinism was as alienating to me as the impeccable lives:

Those closest to the Murphys find it almost impossible to describe the special quality of their life, or the charm it had for their friends. An evening spent in their fragrant garden, looking out over the water toward Cannes and the mountains beyond, listening to records from Gerald’s encyclopedic collection (everything from Bach to the latest jazz), savoring the delicious food that always seemed to appear, exquisitely prepared and served, at the precise moment and under the precise circumstances guaranteed to bring out all its best qualities (Provençal dishes, for the most part, with vegetables and fruits from the Murphys’ garden, though there was often a typically American dish, such as poached eggs on a bed of creamed corn); the passionate attention to every detail of his guests’ pleasure that gave Murphy himself such obvious pleasure; Sara’s piquant beauty and wit, and the intense joy she took in her life and her friends; the three beautiful children, who seemed, like most children who inhabit a special private world, to be completely at home in adult company (Honoria, who looked like a Renoir and was dressed accordingly; Baoth, robust and athletic; Patrick, disturbingly delicate, and with a mercurial brilliance that made him seem “more Gerald than Gerald”) — all contributed to an atmosphere that most people felt wonderfully privileged to share…

And then came their singing of the “American Negro spirituals.”

(All this, even the title of the profile–“Living Well is the Best Revenge”–made me want to throw their smug lives in their faces. Revenge against what? Against the horrible smashup of the Fitzgeralds — one drunk, one crazy — one who died choking on blood, the other on smoke, both before they reached 50?)

Tomkins’s society-page raptures notwithstanding, somewhere around the middle of the thing I began to defrost. First, there’s the death of two of the Murphys’ children — pain that cannot be extinguished by any amount of exquisite living. Then, in the excerpts of letters to and from the Murphys and Fitzgeralds, the real depth of their friendship (relationship, better to say), was revealed. I cannot imagine a relationship of my own bearing so much volatility — surrendering my home to an unhinged friend, placating my other guests when friend flings figs and ashtrays, putting up with his barbs and his staring and his weird questions about money, finally reading myself in his unedifying novel as the beautiful mental patient, the incest victim, the involved but unloving mother. It would be a lot.

Tomkins’s descriptions of the Murphys’ collective life are very like the tableaux Fitzgerald creates in Tender is the Night. Here, in the novel, the young film actress Rosemary is entranced by the Divers on the Mediterranean shores:

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming. Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. The Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did not know that there would be another transition presently from the utter absorption of the swim to the garrulity of the Provencal lunch hour.

What is missing from Tomkins’s account is the resentment that runs through Tender is the Night, the resentment I instinctively felt myself for the Murphys’ Mediterranean menage. Seen thus, the novel is almost a revenge against the Murphys’ good lives, a preemptive retribution; right around the time that Fitzgerald started to die in Hollywood, Gerald Murphy–whose own melancholy spells Tomkins mentions only in passing–took up the family business, a little outfit called Mark Cross, and did a thriving trade for two decades. Perhaps the novel even adds some necessary balance to Tomkins’s fulsomeness.

But as the character of Dick Diver transmutes to Fitzgerald himself, the resentment takes on a strange key. In a novel partly about psychoanalysis, what does it mean that Abe North, the drunk creative type clearly modelled on Fitzgerald, is kicked to death on a spree in New York, a moment that roughly marks the start of Dick Diver’s slow, similarly gin-soaked decline? (Nicole Diver was raped by her father in her lonely adolescence, an event that led to her nervous breakdown. And yet somehow Dick Diver’s Gendarmo punchout, when his Fitzgeraldian side is ascendant, is five-fold more awful.) The novel even suggests, with Fitzgerald’s characteristic attention to money, that Dick’s demise is a tied to his unmanning financial dependence on Nicole. More resentment, class bitterness transferred.

Tender is the Night is no Gatsby, with everything nailed down tight as a coffin-lid at the end. When the novel is over, Dick is still shunting around doing God knows what and living off of Nicole, who has been transferred part and parcel to another, less cerebral man. There’s nary a moral to be had between this novel and its characters. Yet curiously, even with its multiple lives clumsily conflated — extraordinary lives, furthermore, with outsize amounts of talent, privilege, and misfortune — there is something true and lifelike about this flawed, lovely, befuddling book. Writing well may not be the best revenge, but a few decades later, it comes pretty close.

Mod Lib Revue is still one of the (if not the) main reasons to visit The Millions. Hooray for barmy long-running book projects.

This is a fine excavation of the hinterland of both Fitzgerald and his novel – and I’m intrigued by your thoughts on Gatsby as well. Funny, Gatsby apart I’ve always preferred FSF’s short stories. This book is ripe for a revisit – it must be 20 years since I read it last.

wow… first i have to say, i am german. so i read fitzgerald only in translation, but still (well, good translation, i guess…) i love f- scott! also i agree with all what lydia kiesling wrote (well,all i might have understood) about the books of fitzgerald – especially about the “great gatsby”, which is a great book, but in my opinion not as good (as brave, as deep, as honest, as vulnerable, as bleeding, as desperate, as beautiful…) as all of his other novels! for now (after first reading, preliminary verdict…) “tender is the night” is my favourite.

Loved your article! Yes, Fitzgerald is no easy guy to analyze but it’s too bad that his alcoholism interfered so much with his life and work. But I’ve loved the guy since I first read “Winter Dreams” and I can’t bear to hear any harsh criticisms about him. I felt the same about the the Murphy’s, and so too, did Hemingway. He stated how much he had loved the couple but once he had separated from his first wife, he blamed the Murphy’s for encouraging him to leave his wife. I believe he actually said, “they collected people like they collected art”…..something to that effect.
Anyway, thanks so much for your wonderful article. It was a great read!

I recently discovered “The Millions,” and am particularly impressed with Lydia Kiesling’s “Modern Library Revue.” Her fresh takes on the classics stimulate rereading (or first reading, as the case might be). She also encourages one to explore parallel links in culture and art. The 1962 New Yorker profile on the Murphys broadened my appreciation of “Tender is the Night” and Fitzgerald’s circle.
Thank you!

The epigraph to All the King's Men is from Purgatorio, which happens to be my personal favorite stop on Dante's guided tour of the celestial realm. It is so favorite a favorite that I had one of its scenes, a somewhat impressionistic rendering of a Doré rendering, tattooed on my forearm in a fit of youthful bravado. (If I have any regrets about this, they are that I have only a dwindling supply of bravado, and only two arms, and only one life to encounter moving things and be altered by them for the duration.) Anyway, it's an exceedingly helpful epigraph for reading this novel; once Dante has been invoked, he has a way of suffusing everything and providing a theme and trajectory to the work: down, and then up, up, up.
The Divine Comedy has a lot of politics in it, Guelphs and Ghibellines and so forth, because Dante was a political animal who went through the wringer and finally lived out his days in exile, a self-described "party of one." After centuries, most of us read the poet's verse and the footnotes prepared by dedicated historians and have only the vaguest sense of who everyone was. Still, we know that they are meaningful in their perdition or their grace.
Robert Penn Warren's tortured narrator, Jack Burden, was a party of one if ever one there was: a failed law student, historian, journalist, henchman, ungentlemanly Southern gent. Like Dante, he is prone to sudden sleep and wandering into error. Warren evidently protested the designation, but I'll allow that All the King's Men is a novel about politics in the Dantean sense -- politics happens in the story, Guelphs and Ghibellines and hicks and state power and porcine Duffy and inscrutable Stark. But it's not Willie Stark who makes the lasting impression in this novel. It's Jack Burden, party of one, who midway through the journey of his life finds himself in a dark wood, the right path lost. He is here to tell us about several generations of honor and shame, about soiling your good name and living, or not living, with the results. There is no one in this novel, save perhaps the long-suffering Lucy, who does not stain him or herself with some kind of wrong.
Dante was a party of one, but he was also a patriot, if we can try and understand the word outside of that dubious 19th-century invention, the nation state. Dante was a Florentine who loved his city; he celebrated and indicted it in his lovely poem in his beloved language. Reading All the King's Men, I thought a lot about patriotism. This novel is written so beautifully, so stylishly, and feels so American -- with all the muddled greatness and shittiness that descriptor implies -- that my decrepit patriotism pricked up its ears like it sometimes does when I read a stunning novel about America, in fine American English.
After two foreign wars and all manner of troubling happenings on the domestic front, the thinking American, even while she tells herself that states are a construct, can find herself looking wistfully for uncontentious and productive symbols of homeland pride. In these moments, I settle on rock 'n' roll, because I believe that is a genuinely good American invention, one that people from other countries (with the exception of the squares and grumps who turn up in any society) have taken up with great gusto and badass results.
But then, if we work past the hugely powerful instinct to take national ownership in a thing, pride must be tempered by the fact that this American cultural good arose from an indelible stain upon our history. Put very simply, there would be no rock 'n' roll, no jazz, if there were no slaves in America. So you recalibrate your patriotic enthusiasm -- rock music is a great good with a great evil woven into its roots.
All the King's Men is a novel that puts shame front and center -- personal shame, familial shame, state shame. And see in this novel, that other, larger shame: it's a novel with "nigger" on the first page, its world reels from the sin of a woman sold down the river. Maybe it's because the hot, schismatic South has ever had some kind of weird claim on Americanness, but there is something about All the King's Men that like rock 'n' roll seems profoundly American, something paradoxical that makes a person feel like holding up her head about the accident of her citizenship to say, "We made this, so we can't be all bad," even while the thing in question in fact confirms that we can be and are that bad -- on the national scale, on the universal scale, we're that bad.
We're that bad -- but some of us can really write.
Can Robert Penn Warren ever write. He's a poet, and his prose is full of poetry and swagger. It's not a style I thought I favored; I think of my literary tastes, ironically, as running prim and anglophilic. But perhaps it's not a style I favor only because it is often imitated, unwittingly or the reverse, with such excruciating results. There are rioting metaphors on every page; cliches lurk around every corner. A hometown hero, a depressive journalist, a yellowing diary, a buried secret, a war, a zaftig bivalvular ex-wife, all written so beautifully I can hardly stand it. My copy is dog-eared the whole way through, the better to find the remarkable passages that proliferate therein.
We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summers before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been falling a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn't like any of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down through the black, gummy, dispirited air.
They flow like this, one after another, in a manner that sometimes sounds free-wheeling and unconstructed, like a drugstore poet shooting the breeze between sips from his soda pop. But try to write a letter and sound like Robert Penn Warren. Try to write a story.
I rejoice in this great American novel, a reminder of people's capacity for those universal states, perdition and grace. Jack Burden says "what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good, and the devil take the hindmost." Jack Burden asks if we are only as a good as the worst thing we've ever done and we have to concede it is so. It is so, but there's a chance of heaven yet. Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.

I first read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie very rapidly and while reading made quiet moos of concern and befuddlement. There was a Miss Brodie in her prime! Her girls were the crème de la crème! Rose Stanley was famous for sex! When I finished I put the novel down and took a moment to contemplate. "What a weird little book," I said to no one in particular, and closed the file on Miss Brodie. Later, thinking this analysis unsatisfactory and contrary to the spirit of the Modern Library Revue, I decided to have another look. As this novel does have the advantage of being a little book, I read it twice more. Today I can say confidently that it is, indeed, a weird little book. Now, though, my use of "weird" incorporates more of the word's bewitching and macabre aspects, and fewer of its heeggh-I-don't-get-it ones.
Brief books are dangerous for me, because I am a swift reader and not always a careful one. Big books, when they are not too patently formal experiments, seem better suited to my taste and temperament. I have something of the philistine in me and short important novels, for no really good reason, threaten artsiness and unfulfillment. They seem as though they are harder to write, and I worry their authors have more to prove. How will you make your novel memorable when it it looks so diminutive, sitting there on the shelf? They require an economy that is against my nature.
I had been meandering through A Suitable Boy, which is familiar and soothes my soul, and I had to forcibly change gears to appreciate Muriel Spark. This novel is not something huge and engrossing to help you forget the common round of day. It is over quickly, and you have to pay attention all the way through. It is a dark and lovely poem, written by the possessor of a sinister wit. It is a deep pool in an enchanted forest.
Muriel Spark wrote a very nice piece for The New Yorker in which she described her years at James Gillespie's High School for Girls in Edinburgh, the inspiration for the Marcia Blaine School of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. What I like about the piece, and what I find remarkable in contrast with this sort of creepy novel, is the lightheartedness, warmth, and happiness with which Spark remembers this bygone epoch of young ladies' education. This is an education which seems in small ways rather gruesome to me. Most of the young men are gone, for example, because they died in the Great War, and if they didn't die they were maimed. The science teacher tells the girls "Poor little Tommy Jones/ We'll see him no more,/ For what he thought was H2O/ Was H2SO4." And there's Mr. Gordon, the history teacher, in connection with whom Spark writes, "The innocence of our minds and the universal decency of our schoolteachers' comportment can be gathered from the fact that he used to make me sit at the front of the class so that he could stroke my hair while teaching, without anyone thinking at all ill of him."
And yet this time, which seems prime with the makings of a dark novel, inspired Spark's childhood friend to write, "we had the best life." Spark concurs: "In spite of the fact that we had no television, that in my home at least we had no electricity all during the thirties (only beautiful gaslight), that there were no antibiotics and no Pill, I incline to think that [she] is right."
Then Ms. Kay, the inspiration for Jean Brodie herself: "In a sense, Ms. Kay was nothing like Ms. Brodie. In another sense, she was far above and beyond her Brodie counterpart." Ms. Kay was immediately recognizable to all her former students in Spark's novel, and remembered fondly by the same. Spark records Ms. Kay's position on rain gear:
Why make a wet day more dreary than it is? We should wear bright coats, and carry blue umbrellas, or green...I would like to see a gray coat and skirt for the spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. 'Citron' means 'lemon'; it is a yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue. One would wear a citron beret in Paris with a gray suit.
How heavenly to come under the tutelage of Ms. Kay! Reading the happiness with which Spark described her childhood, I vacillated between thinking I had perhaps read too much grotesquery into the novel, and admiring the artistry which turns a picturesque figure of memory and the interwar spunkiness of the youth into the dubious heroines of an unsettling book. Because I was unsettled by this book. What I read into it is the particular weirdness and villainy of women; both the author and her subjects have that hint of the stuff for which they used to burn ladies at the stake. The recurring sentences become incantations, some of them biblical, like an inverted cross. And how else to take the death of stupid Mary Macgregor who, we are reminded with cruel repetition, "ran hither and thither till she died"?
Poor Mary! Miss Brodie tells the girls that silence is golden and calls on Mary to repeat:
Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, 'Golden.'
'What did I say was golden?'
Mary cast her eyes around her and up above. Sandy whispered, 'The falling leaves.'
'The falling leaves,' said Mary.
'Plainly,' said Miss Brodie, 'you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me I would make of you the crème de la crème.'
The novel is cruel, and often comic in its cruelty. A man exposes himself to Jenny, one of the Brodie set, as she walks by the Water of Leith. After the initial shock and the subsequent parental hindrance of Jenny's movements, the event "brought nothing but good. The subject fell under two headings: first, the man himself and the nature of what he had exposed to view, and secondly the policewoman" for whom the girls form an intense passion (the Brodie set in their sex talk sound very like the Mitford sisters in theirs).
Spark, who wrote in her memoir of school that she was "destined to poetry by all my mentors," in her novel uses the tools of poetry to change the sense and meaning of prose in an unnerving way:
That spring she monopolised with her class the benches under the elm from which could be seen an endless avenue of dark pink May trees, and heard the trotting of horses in time to the turning wheels of light carts returning home empty by a hidden lane from their early morning rounds.
There is a rhythm to her writing, even apart from the periodic repetitions.
Sandy, the saboteur of the Brodie set, the betrayer of Brodie, converts to Catholicism, joins a convent and attracts a following by writing a treatise on "the nature of moral perception" called "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace." Spark, with her incantations and her twisty prose and her new words like "unbrainfully," in her own way transfigures the commonplace on both the spiritual and literal planes: the sunset is "streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life." The girls of the Brodie set compete with each other on the "windswept hockey fields which lay like the graves of the martyrs exposed to the weather in an outer suburb." And then one pretender to the Brodie set is actually martyred--the nonentical Joyce Emily, urged by Miss Brodie the fascist to venture off in aid of unspeakable Franco.
The novel is not wholly sinister; it has something of the piquant flavor of Spark's happy school days. I think it is a fine place novel too, with Edinburgh (which, as Sandy finds when she enters the convent, is actually a multiplicity of Edinburghs) making itself felt as the backdrop to the book's action. The hills that surround them are the Pentland hills, the writers in the girls' cosmos are Stevenson, Burns, Walter Scott. There is Scottish pride here.
This novel is like Sandy's eyes--famous for being small, but photographic, and containing manifold secrets. It is a weird little book. I didn't quite like it first, but now I reckon it among the crème de la crème.